29 July 2015

"Do not declare a holiday on my death. Instead work an extra day, if you love me". The man behind these words was the former Indian president A. P. J. Abdul Kalam, who passed away Monday.

Abdul Kalam wanted India to become a knowledge superpower, and my impression is that his goal will be reached. There is a reason we have a kalmstrom.com Office in India! My Indian colleague Rituka Rimza will tell you more about this popular scientist and politician.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was born in 1931, and even if he was the president of India between 2002 and 2007 he dedicated most of his life to science. He studied physics and aerospace engineering and later became a leader of the Defence Research and Development Organisation. He also administered the Indian Space Research Organisation, which last year sent a spacecraft to Mars.

Internationally Abdul Kalam was well known and respected, and he received many awards for his work. In 2005, when Kalam visited France and Switzerland, the world's largest physics laboratory, CERN, declared 26 May to be a Science Day in his honor.

In spite of his fame, A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was a very simple person. In his childhood he used to sell newspapers to support his family and to afford his education. At that time he often ate at a small restaurant in front of which a cobbler used to sit on the road, and it is significant for Abdul Kalam that he did not forget the cobbler and the owner of the restaurant when he became president. Instead he invited them to be his guests in the presidential palace at several occasions.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam was not only a giant in his special field but also took an active interest in the development of other scientific areas than his own. In his book India 2020 he set an action plan to develop India into a knowledge superpower.

He realized that the whole of India must be included if this goal should be reached, so he let his salary go into a trust called Providing Urban Amenities to Rural Areas, which works for rural development in India.

During his presidency, Abdul Kalam was known as the "People's President", and his whole career was distinguished by his aim to improve conditions for the Indian people. He liked to teach, and he passed away while lecturing.

I am glad he did not have to suffer but instead died when fully engaged in a situation he enjoyed after a long, eventful life. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam will be remembered with fondness and gratitude.
Rituka Rimza
Sales and Marketing Assistantkalmstrom.com Business Solutions

28 July 2015

The release of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint V4 gives enhancements requested by evaluators who already use SharePoint for task and project management but want to have all the extras that Kanban Task Manager gives. Current users will instead appreciate that we have added a possibility to create Excel reports on task data.

Select task list
By default Kanban Task Manager uses a custom SharePoint list for the tasks that are visualized on the kanban board, but in the new version organizations can switch to another task list. When they do, the tasks in the selected list will be displayed on the kanban board. They will be color coded by project or responsible and possible to drag between phases and lanes just like the tasks in the default list.

Pick responsible from user accounts
The Kanban Task Manager custom lists for Phases and Responsibles can still be used, but from this version the default option is to instead use the Assigned To field, to pick the responsible for each task. The creator of the tasks is picked by default, so you only have to assign the task if you are creating it for someone else.

Phases = Status options in task listKanban Task Manager is now using the task list's Status options as phase names, but if you prefer the old way, with a custom Phases list that option is also possible.

The default SharePoint options for Status in tasks lists are Not Started, In Progress, Completed, Deferred and Waiting on someone else. These values may be changed in the list settings of the task list, but we also give a possibility to do it from the Kanban Task Manager Configure page.

However, our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza, who has been responsible for the development of the new SharePoint version, is an excellent problem solver. He never gives up, so now the SharePoint version of Kanban Task Manager also has Excel reports on how tasks have been handled.

Upgradekalmstrom.com Subscribers have free upgrades, and we recommend current users to upgrade their installations. Just replace the .wsp file and reactivate Kanban Task Manager, and then you can continue working with your tasks. Refer to the Revisions page for a full list of enhancements and bug fixes.

You can continue using our custom lists for Phases or Responsibles, but if you want to switch to the SharePoint options described above you can do that in the settings.

Try itIf you have not yet tried Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint, you are welcome to evaluate the solution. There is plenty of documentation on our website, and should you still have questions I hope you will contact us. We are here to assist you!

I hope that the combination of book, demos and exercises will make the learning both efficient and entertaining.

From basic to advancedExcel 2016 from Scratch starts from the very beginning, so that you can follow this course even if you never have used Excel before. If you know the basics of Excel already, just skim through the first chapter and start reading more thoroughly when you find something that is new to you.

Calculation and visualizationExcel 2016 from Scratch covers several areas where Excel is useful, but focus is on calculation and data visualization, where Excel really shines. I explain how formulas are designed and how Excel can help you creating the correct formula for each calculation, and I show how data can be visualized in many different ways.

For earlier Excel versions too
Microsoft has not made any dramatic changes in Excel 2016 user interface or features, so even if I call my tutorial series Excel 2016 from Scratch, it can be used for earlier versions of Excel. When I write this Excel 2016 has not even been published, so I used a preview version for my video recordings and screenshots.

Team workExcel 2016 from Scratch is not only my own creation. Two other members of the kalmstrom.com team, Kate Kalmström and Rituka Rimza, have made major contributions.

Both Rituka and Kate have edited my video demonstrations and created the articles in the kalmstrom.com Tips section, and they have also enhanced the book.

Kate was a teacher for many years before she joined kalmstrom.com, and she has also written school books of her own. Therefore she could help me arrange the text in the most pedagogic way,

After that Rituka proofread the text and pointed out where the wording could be made clearer and easier to understand.

I am grateful to the dedicated work of Kate and Rituka, and I also want to thank Vijayant Rimza, who designed and created the winning cover for the book.

Creating an e-book was enjoyable and interesting, and I hope Excel 2016 from Scratch will be useful to many. Being the one I am, I have plans for the next book already, but that is something I will tell you about in another blog post.

14 July 2015

The kalmstrom.com team members are highly qualified, something that our customers are well aware of and appreciate. Therefore I was happy but not surprised when one of our developers was admitted to the high-ranked U.S. research university Carnegie Mellon. My warm congratulations, Rahul Somani!

Project oriented studies
From August Rahul will follow the Master of Science in Information Technology e-Business Program at the Carnegie Mellon University. His studies at Carnegie Mellon will be project oriented.
Instead of traditional lectures, student teams develop solutions to business problems using the latest information technologies, and they are evaluated on the deliverables they produce, not on test scores. I am sure this will suit Rahul perfectly.

Studies
Rahul is eager to learn, so he has taken many courses above his degree in Computer Science and Engineering, for example Microsoft certifications for SQL Server and ASP.NET. He has also completed the well-known Infosys Mysore Training. However, the projects he has worked with were also very important for his admission to Carnegie Mellon.

Qualifying work
To qualify for the program Rahul submitted several projects that show his capacity to work in a constructive way with advanced technologies like SharePoint, JavaScript, ASP.NET, SQL Server, C# and XSLT.

We have recently released a SharePoint version of Calendar Browser, the kalmstrom.com resource booking solution, and Rahul played an important role in the development. Calendar Browser for SharePoint was therefore one of the projects he submitted to Carnegie Mellon.

Celebration
The kalmstrom.com team members in Indore celebrated Rahul's success with a dinner and an outing to the Jayanti Devi Temple.
Of course everyone wanted to take the opportunity to have a selfie with their soon absent team mate.

I could not come this time, but together with Kate and Sigge I wish Rahul Somani a wonderful stay in the U.S. We hope it will be everything you dream of!

06 July 2015

SharePoint version requestedCalendar Browser helps you to create and manage bookings for all kinds of company resources. The Outlook version of Calendar Browser was first developed 15 years ago, and today this add-on is used by organizations worldwide.
In the last years many have asked for a SharePoint version of Calendar Browser, which can be reached from anywhere over the Internet.

Well-known platform
The main Calendar Browser feature is of course the possibility to book resources without having to use a separate software. When you are already familiar with SharePoint, it is very easy to learn how to book resources with Calendar Browser.
Even users who don't know SharePoint will soon understand the idea, because almost everyone knows how to use a calendar – and that is what you do when you book a resource in Calendar Browser!

Each resource has its own calendar, and when you want to use a resource you simply add an event for the time period you need in the calendar of that resource.

The Calendar Browser extras
Even if Calendar Browser for SharePoint uses as much standard SharePoint features as possible, we have created a custom calendar view that gives a good, colorful view of the resource calendars.

But Calendar Browser is much more than resource calendars gathered on a SharePoint page. The solution gives users a possibility to add supplies to their bookings and to tie each booking to a project or other parameter.Calendar Browser also prevents double bookings, and it has an Overview that shows resource reservations and supply bookings in various printable views and reports.

Benefit from the SharePoint integrationCalendar Browser is fully integrated in SharePoint, and we have developed Calendar Browser to take advantage of the SharePoint structure and features.Calendar Browser is a sandboxed solution that is deployed at site level and can be used on any SharePoint site. All editions of SharePoint 2010, 2013 and Office 365 SharePoint are supported.

Team work
It is a privilege to have a dynamic and bright team that can transform my design ideas into an operational software solution. The kalmstrom.com developers Arpeet Gujarathi, Rahul Somani and Sharad Verma have been building most of Calendar Browser for SharePoint, under the guidance of Lead Developer Jayant Rimza.

"Working with Calendar Browser for SharePoint was a challenge, because we had to make many features work smoothly together, which required special attention", says Arpeet about the development. "We must consider how large organizations are managed, and this has widened my horizon."

Calendar Browser for SharePoint was Rahul's first kalmstrom.com Solution, as he joined the team as late as in January: "To develop Calendar Browser we had to think way out of the box", he declares. "When Jayant introduced me to the solution I thought about my earlier organization and their bottlenecks with resource booking.

This project helped me get to know some great colleagues, and I really enjoy the kalmstrom.com cheerful working environment. I also discovered that the kalmstrom.com developers always were prepared to walk that extra mile to achieve the best solution, even if it took a bit longer to build."
Try Calendar Browser for SharePoint!I hope you want to try the latest kalmstrom.com solution, a SharePoint solution for resource booking. You are welcome to download Calendar Browser for SharePoint and evaluate it for 30 days.
On the kalmstrom.com website you can find a slideshow for a first presentation of Calendar Browser for SharePoint, and for more detailed information we offer video demonstrations and Admin and User manuals.

With the help of that documentation I hope you will find it easy to set up and try Calendar Browser on your SharePoint site, but remember that the kalmstrom.com support team is here to assist you if you have questions.

02 July 2015

With TimeCard for SharePoint you can report working hours directly from the SharePoint calendar where you plan your time. Now we will soon release a mobile app for TimeCard, so that you don’t have to open your PC to add and edit events that should be reported. Instead you can do that in your smartphone.

The responsible developer, Madhur Trivedi, will tell you more about TimeCard for SharePoint Mobile.Smaller devices
Computing is moving towards smaller devices, and the market for mobile applications is booming. People are looking for a mobile app for every application they use on a PC (online or offline).

Keeping up with the latest trends, kalmstrom.com is soon coming with a mobile app for our solution TimeCard for SharePoint. The app will support three popular mobile platforms, Windows Phone, iOS and Android, and it will be called TimeCard for SharePoint Mobile, with TimeCard Mobile as the short form.

Do all this with TimeCard Mobile
In the first released version of TimeCard for SharePoint Mobile, we are offering the following features:

Tag events with the tag values from your Personal settings on the SharePoint site (like Customer, Project or Task).

View events list.

Filter the events list based on week, month or date.

Add a new event on a particular date with the following information: title, start date, end date, location and description.

Delete events.

Edit events. Also events (recurring or none recurring) that were previously added directly in SharePoint can be edited.

Application flowTo use TimeCard for SharePointMobile you must be added to your organization’s TimeCard for SharePointinstallation. When TimeCard Mobile is started the first time, the app asks you to enter the URL to the SharePoint site where TimeCard is installed. After successful authentication, you will be taken to the app’s events page, where you can see today’s pre-scheduled events.

The events page has three views: Day view, Week view and Month view. The Day view shows events on a selected date (default date is today), the Week view shows events on a particular week (default is the current week) and the Month view shows events in a selected month (default is the current month).

Each event has buttons for Edit and Delete., and you can easily navigate back and forth in the app while filtering events and performing Add, Edit and Delete event operations.

DevelopmentTimeCard Mobile is developed on top of Cordova, which is a hybrid mobile application development framework. Popular web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript and jQuery and an MVC framework AngularJs have been used in this Single page application, which was created in Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 IDE.

The development of TimeCard Mobile has been interesting, and it has been a pleasure to cooperate with our JavaScript expert, Senior Developer Sharad Verma, on this project. I hope we soon can release our new app. I am sure all TimeCard for SharePoint users will appreciate TimeCard Mobile!